What CIOs need from IT schools

Page Tools

At recent roundtables held by MIS Asia, a common grumble from
CIOs was that IT graduates werent ready to hold jobs in the
real world.

Among the complaints: Choosy attitudes that lead to job-hopping.
Grads who think they know everything. And grads who want to only
handle servers and networks, shying away from heading projects or
facing users and the business.

To boldly go where no techie has gone before With businesses
leaning more heavily on technology, the demands on new hires are
growing beyond simple office skills. Admin and sales staff, for
example, now need IT knowledge.

However, IT workers, who already have those skills, are expected
to have strong business acumen as well. "IT functions as a support,
enabler and driver for business activities," explains Mohammad
Irfan, CIO of Bank Rakyat Indonesia. Irfan defines most IT
initiatives as "IT-based business projects instead of just IT
projects."

While their needs are clear, employers generally believe that IT
courses have not kept up with the times. In a survey by US-based
publication CIO Insight conducted last October, over 61 per cent of
the 580 respondents felt that college graduates are poorly prepared
to work in the real world of business IT.

These young techies may be able to write code, but 74 per cent
of the CIOs surveyed believed they lacked skills in areas such as
project management, and 71 per cent considered them woefully
unprepared for business operations.

The good news is that educational institutions in the region are
not blind to these developments in the business world. From the
vantage point of their ivory towers, IT academics have been
designing curricula to turn out more business-savvy graduates with
the right mix of skills for the workplace. "It is the main job of
Bangkok University to offer curricula that allows students to
successfully work after their graduation," says Attipa Jullapisit,
the director of Bangkok Universitys Computer Centre.

Far from passing the buck to hiring companies to train up their
own staff, Jullapisit feels that since universities specialise in
teaching and training, "it is fair enough that the companies leave
the training part to the university."

Her words are echoed by Steven Miller, dean of Singapore
Management Universitys (SMU) School of Information Systems.
"Our entire program is designed to produce business IT
professionals," he asserts.

"As a university, it is our job to prepare students to enter the
workforce, and to adapt to what we know will be a very dynamic and
uncertain future over the next several decades. It is essential
that we do both of these things."

Miller, who also serves as practice professor of information
systems, sees the responsibility of educational institutions as
stretching far beyond simply training students to become
employable.

"If we only aim to prepare students to enter their very first
job, they will not have the mindset needed to grow over time," he
says. "So we have to look very closely at both near-term and
long-term needs for professional development and education."

The new U
With these goals in mind, SMU has designed its undergraduate IT
degree so that one-third of its focus is on technology, design, and
applications.

Another third consists of a non-IT "second major," where
students may choose courses offered by SMUs business,
accounting, economics and social science faculties. The remaining
portion comes from the common university core, modelled after the
liberal arts component of American-style universities.

"As a university program, we have the obligation to prepare
students to more effectively integrate into the workforce," notes
Miller.

"We need to inculcate the learn how to learn
mindset, and give students both the means and the confidence to
face new situations and figure out how to proceed, combining what
they know, what they can research on their own and what they can
learn through working with and through networks."

The IT component naturally aims to equip students with enough
basic skills to handle the technical aspects of their work. The
second major allows students to opt for studies in areas such as
finance, marketing, supply chain operations, management, corporate
communications or sociology. "Any one of these options adds an
incredibly important dimension and new perspective to our business
IT students," observes Miller.

The common core courses are aimed at helping students improve
their reading and writing skills.

After going through the wide scope of subjects, it is expected
that "all of our students have strong grounding in business-related
areas and in the soft skills that are so important for effective
communication and consultation," says Miller.

Students at Bangkok University can choose between two paths.
Those who prefer to concentrate on technical issues can opt for the
traditional computer science program. The IT program, on the other
hand, adds business and legal courses into the mix. Subjects on
offer include business law, financial information systems and
strategic management.

They are aimed at giving students a stronger grasp of the
non-technical issues that their jobs might entail.

Bangkok University not only seeks to turn out well-rounded IT
graduates, but to boost the tech savvy of their business graduates
by offering a computing program to its business students.

Besides their core studies, students learn about computer
applications in manufacturing and finance, statistical software for
decision-making and microcomputer applications in business.
Students who enter institutions like Bangkok University and SMU can
rest assured that their degrees dont just look good on paper.
The programs have been designed in consultation with the business
world. "We talk to business people frequently, and they are
strongly supportive of our vision of the hybrid business-IT
professional," Miller says.

"The university is producing business-IT graduates. This is a
result of the way the whole degree is structured and the culture of
the entire SMU community. Our students feel very comfortable with
projects that include both business process and strategy issues, as
well as technology issues related to how service and process
innovation can be driven and supported by IT."

Jullapisit concurs. Honed by interaction with IT companies,
Bangkok Universitys program now produces students who conform
to "an instant package that can immediately plug into a position
and work."

The university also cooperates closely with firms such as Cisco
Systems, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and Sybase to cover
topics like networks, databases, Java programming and mobile
devices in its curricula.

No room for complacency
However, neither IT graduates nor the companies that hire them
should fall into the trap of assuming that all the hard work is
behind them. It is unrealistic to expect an undergraduate program
to deliver real-world business experience.

"It is a fact of life that industries and IT change and evolve
continuously," says Miller. "Therefore employees will somehow have
to keep changing mindsets and learning a lot of new details in
order to survive over time. Our students will have to learn an
incredible amount once they enter their first job, or any
subsequent job."

"IT makes it possible, to some extent, for people to learn more
on their own. But in addition, people in the workforce will have to
be always mentoring others through a structured training program or
informal means," he adds.

Just as tertiary institutions have already taken up the
challenge of preparing students that businesses want to recruit,
the firms that hire them have to ensure that they stay
relevant.

Observes Miller: "A company that has no need to train its
employees really has nothing special to offer to either its
employees or its customers."